BeastLink: Yes, You Can Eat People & Flatten the City
- Niels Gys
- 11 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Quick Verdict
BeastLink launched into Steam Early Access on August 18, 2026, and yes, the central fantasy is real: you fight as a human, gather serum, transform into a bloody great kaiju, smash through buildings and occasionally eat people to restore health.
This isn't an open-world monster crime simulator. There are no banks to rob, criminal empires to build or terrified shopkeepers watching Godzilla reverse-park through their bakery.
It's an objective-based multiplayer action game where the escalation from soldier → vehicle → enormous urban insurance claim forms the heart of the experience.
And that distinction matters, because BeastLink's best idea isn't merely tat you can play as the monster.
It's that becoming the monster changes the scale of the game.
The problem, one day into Early Access, is that the machinery surrounding that excellent idea is currently held together with cable ties, optimism and a patch notes page that's already earning overtime.
Want another game where being the monster is the entire bloody point? Hariti puts you on the less socially acceptable side of the food chain. Read our Hariti coverage and continue disappointing humanity.
So What the Hell Is BeastLink?
Developed and published by Grove Street Games, BeastLink currently mixes PvP and PvE combat across three maps with four playable Beasts.
You begin at human scale. There are guns, vehicles, aircraft and objectives to deal with while creatures considerably higher up the food chain turn the surrounding architecture into gravel.
Then serum enters the equation.
Collect enough and you can BeastLink, transforming into one of the game's kaiju.
Suddenly buildings stop being buildings.
They're foliage.
Walk through them.
Smash them.
Use your monster abilities against other Beasts.
Eat hostile humans to regain health.
Destroying structures while transformed can also increase Mind Sync, meaning the destruction isn't just a graphical party trick bolted onto the game because somebody discovered the physics engine after three beers. Wrecking the environment actually feeds into play.
That's BeastLink's hook, and it's a damn good one.
Lots of games let you fight monsters.
BeastLink eventually looks at the enormous bastard that has been flattening the neighbourhood and says:
Fine. Your turn.
The City Is Basically Disposable
The current modes use that central idea in different ways.
Beast Brawl has players collecting serum, transforming and scoring through Beast takedowns.
Hazard Pay revolves around escorting scientists around Beasts to gather data, while rival teams can steal the scientist from you. This is technically theft, although calling BeastLink a crime game because of it would be like calling Mario Kart organised vehicle crime because somebody nicked your banana.
Colony Purge sends players after infested buildings, nests and control zones.
There's also Battle Arena, which gets considerably closer to removing the administrative middleman and letting the giant monsters beat industrial quantities of shit out of one another.
Vehicles matter too. You aren't simply running between kaiju encounters on human feet while wondering why nobody thought to bring a car. Ground vehicles and aircraft are part of the battlefield, and vehicles themselves can smash through structures.
The result is a game constantly playing with scale.
One minute a building is cover.
The next it's something you're driving through.
Then you transform and the entire street becomes packaging material.
That's where BeastLink has something genuinely interesting.
Prefer your destruction with actual organised crime attached? Mafia: The Old Country - Man of Honor adds fresh criminal work to Free Ride, because apparently organised crime needed an expansion pack. Read our Man of Honor coverage next.
Being the Monster Doesn't Quite Make You the Villain
For CRIMENET purposes, there's an important distinction here.
BeastLink absolutely delivers a playable monster fantasy. It does not currently establish much of a playable villain fantasy.
You can become a giant creature. You can demolish urban environments. You can kill humans and eat them for health, which is admittedly difficult to explain at the Pearly Gates as an unfortunate misunderstanding.
But these actions happen within competitive and combat objectives.
You're not terrorising a functioning civilian city for personal gain. You're not building a criminal operation. You're not choosing an evil campaign route. You're not starting your morning by eating six commuters and demanding the mayor deliver £40 million in unmarked notes before lunch.
The monster is a weapon and combat role.
That doesn't make it less interesting. It just makes BeastLink something different from a game built around being evil.
And frankly, the ability to turn yourself into a biological demolition notice is already plenty.
Early Access Has Arrived Carrying a Fire Extinguisher
This is where the launch gets considerably less glamorous.
BeastLink entered Early Access with only the opening portion of its planned story content alongside its multiplayer modes, three maps and four Beasts. Grove Street Games currently expects the journey toward version 1.0 to continue roughly into summer 2027.
The first Steam response has been rough.
At the time of launch, only around a third of its first 80 Steam reviews were positive. That's far too small and early a sample to carve the game's gravestone, but it's enough to say the reception hasn't exactly arrived wearing a party hat.
More concrete are the problems Grove Street Games has already patched.
The first update addressed a DLSS-related performance issue affecting some RTX 4000 and 5000-series systems, players ending up on incorrect server regions and suffering heavy lag, invisible or broken vehicles, crashes, AI problems and Beast eating ranges capable of producing deaths that looked thoroughly divorced from physical reality.
In other words, BeastLink launched on August 18 and by August 19 the patch notes already read like the incident report from a zoo where somebody left every enclosure open.
The encouraging part is obvious: the developer reacted quickly.
The less encouraging part is that there was already quite a lot requiring quick reaction.
Finished here but still require professionally curated bad decisions? This Week in CRIME rounds up the crime, villain and horror games actually worth knowing about, plus whatever fresh catastrophe the games industry has driven through a wall this week.
Should You Jump Into BeastLink Yet?
Treat BeastLink as exactly what it currently is: a very early Early Access game built around one genuinely excellent idea.
The idea works on paper and, crucially, its defining mechanics actually exist. This isn't a Steam page promising that one day you'll become an unstoppable monster while the current build contains two corridors and a JPEG of a lizard.
You really can transform.
You really can smash the city apart.
You really can fight other enormous creatures.
You really can eat people.
It's the surrounding game that still has something to prove.
The current technical problems, tiny amount of launch evidence and limited Early Access content make this a terrible moment for grand declarations about BeastLink's long-term quality.
But there's enough here to keep watching.
Because the difficult part wasn't coming up with a game where soldiers fight giant monsters.
The clever bit was recognising that eventually everyone staring up at the kaiju is going to have the same thought:
Fuck the rocket launcher. I want to be that thing.
Comments